You can't give tickets away for young people to watch opera, not even Wagner's rarely performed Ring, arguably the greatest event in the operatic canon. That appears to be the devastating conclusion of an embarrassing experiment at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Scottish Opera's ambitious complete Ring cycle sold out as long ago as October, but the organisers of the Festival held back one performance of Götterdämmerung for people under 27. Faced with frequent attacks that it was elitist, "out of touch", and aimed only at the "middle-aged upper middle class audience", the heavily subsidised Festival hoped that the free ticket offer would help to reverse its demographic.

But only 237 young people turned up for the performance on Friday, leaving a staggering 1,660 seats empty in the flagship Festival Theatre.

As the climax to Wagner's four-part epic - so costly to produce that companies only attempt it every few decades - Götterdämmerung should have been the hottest ticket of the month-long festival.

Last night, festival organisers put a brave face on the fiasco, saying the pitiful turnout was "good considering what a warm day it was outside".

"Obviously a six-hour Wagner opera on a Friday was always going to be a hard sell," a spokesman said. "We're delighted. Even if we only turn 50 people on to opera, it is a major success. We never expected we would fill the theatre."

In contrast, there were queues around the block on Saturday - when temperatures were higher - for the theatrical segment of their free Gateway Weekend, Chekhov's The Seagull starring Fiona Shaw and Iain Glenn at the King's Theatre. The weekend was subsidised with £38,000 from Edinburgh city council. Opera, it appears, is singularly unappealing.

The debacle comes against the backdrop of record receipts on the Fringe, with predominantly young audiences packing temporary venues across the city. Already it is clear that the Fringe will far exceed the 1m tickets sold last year.

The Book Festival is breaking records too, with nearly a quarter of a million people expected to hear 550 authors read and discuss their work. Box office is up 90% on two years ago. The Film Festival is also set for a record year.

The failure of Götterdämmerung to appeal to the young, even for free, is all the more galling as thousands pay West End prices to see the National Theatre's Jerry Springer: The Opera. On the Fringe, tickets for a comic, abridged version of the Ring are also selling fast.

The disappointing turnout can only add to the woes of Scottish Opera at what should have been its moment of triumph. With its budget frozen for the next three years, some commentators feel this critically acclaimed Ring may be its last "big hurrah".

Despite the findings of a confidential report into the company commissioned from the opera director Peter Jonas, which recommended a big rise in its £7.3m budget, it is likely to come under pressure to shed jobs, and cut back on productions. The company has been bailed out by the Scottish Arts Council twice in the past four years to the tune of £7.1m.

The Jonas report, which has never been published, said that despite absorbing the lion's share of grants to the arts, the company gave good value for money compared with its European counterparts.

But his findings have fallen on deaf ears. Devolution has so far proved a disaster for the arts north of the border. Unlike England and Wales, where funding has been greatly increased, the Scottish Executive has imposed a spending standstill, prompting an exodus of talent south. Theatre has been particularly badly hit.

While most observers blame the failure of the Götterdämmerung offer on a bizarre failure to market it properly, the Festival is likely to provoke equal outrage for what it has put on stage. Calixto Bieito, the Catalan director of the disastrous Barbaric Comedies at the festival three years ago, who also stoked protest with his sexed-up Masked Ball at English National Opera, is back with a new Birmingham Rep production of Hamlet.

But for sheer shock value, even Bieito cannot compete with the Argentine play The Last Night of Mankind, which opens with its naked cast writhing in a muddy heap of dead babies. Set in a time when the human race has been wiped out, they later play catch with dead foetuses.